


Trick Shots

by subjunctive



Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Competition, F/M, Trick Arrows, strip archery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-07
Updated: 2014-04-07
Packaged: 2018-01-18 11:56:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1427584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subjunctive/pseuds/subjunctive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint can't back down from a dare. And Kate's tone is <i>very</i> daring.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trick Shots

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pyroblaze18 (kultiras)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kultiras/gifts).



Kate wrapped the masking tape around the shaft, pressing to get out all the air bubbles. NET, it read, nice and easy to see in purple Sharpie. She set it aside, adding it to the small but growing pile, and took another swig of her beer, which was rapidly warming.

"Don't tell me _Tony Stark_ is trying to save money by being cheap on the A/C," she grumbled.

"He might've said something about diverting the energy in the building for some kinda experiment. It's too bad he hasn't figured out how to control the weather," Clint said without looking up, a crease appearing between his eyebrows as he balanced a bola arrow on one finger. She watched it bob hypnotically. "Even Tony's billions can't change a New York summer."

Kate hmphed, but it was without feeling. It was like the summer heat was sucking it all out of her. "What's this one?" she asked, holding up an unfamiliar arrow. She was starting to recognize the common ones, but some of the designs still eluded her. She'd always preferred to stick to the old-fashioned kind anyway. Point and shoot, nice and simple. Plus, you were never going to grab the wrong one by accident.

Clint's eyes flicked up. "Putty," he said immediately.

Raising an eyebrow, Kate reached for the roll of masking tape. "Putty?" she asked dubiously. "Like, silly putty putty? What does it _do_?"

He scowled and snagged the tape back from her, heedless of her offended _Hey!_ "Don't disrespect the gear." He caught her rolling her eyes at him and huffed. " _To answer your question,_ it's gunk. It gets gunk everywhere. That's it."

"Riiight. Okay." Kate pressed her beer bottle to one temple, elbow propped up on her knee. "Hey, this is boring. You know what we should do?" She clinked her bottle against his for emphasis.

"What should we do?" Clint eyed her suspiciously.

She swiped a bead of sweat from her forehead and sucked it off her knuckle. "We should have a contest."

"What kind of contest would that be?" He wrote _PUTTY_ in chicken scratch - how he was even going to be able to read that later, Kate had no idea - and tore off the strip with his teeth.

"Gross." But Kate held out the arrow for labeling anyway. "And it'll be an archery contest, obviously."

Clint frowned. "Didn't we do that already? I seem to remember winning the last one, girly-girl."

Leaning over, Kate punched him in the leg. "See, that's why it's a great idea. Rematch! Plus, I'm really bored."

"Hmmm." But he sounded interested, and Kate knew she had him. "What's the prize? Last time it was my bow. Which you stole back, even though you lost, by the way. Hey, maybe _that_ should be--"

"Nope, off the table."

He chuckled. "Scared, girly-girl?"

"In your dreams," scoffed Kate, standing up to grab their bows from where they were leaning against one wall. "Let's do something more . . . interesting."

Clint gave her a lazy half-grin. Now she definitely had his attention. "I'm always up for _interesting._ " A frown replaced the smile. "Within, y'know, limits."

She handed him his bow. "What about . . . strip archery?" She waggled her eyebrows, trying to look as nonchalant as possible.

He sputtered on his beer. " _What?_ "

"I hope you understand the basic idea of putting the word 'strip' in front of a game, Clint." Before he could object, she continued with some expressive gesturing. "I'm thinking, someone misses a shot, they have to take something off. Or we could do it the other way - someone makes a shot, the other takes something off."

"Is that what the kids are doing nowadays?" he mumbled, bringing his beer up to his mouth again. She wasn't even wearing a lot, just little jean shorts and a tank top, which he most certainly did not notice. But women always seemed to have more clothing. He looked down at himself: shoes, jeans, tee shirt, boxers. This could get pretty embarrassing pretty fast.

"You don't have to do it if you don't want to," Kate said sweetly. "If you're scared of losing."

His competitive ire rose at that. Not the most admirable impulse at the best of times, outside a good fight anyway, and _now_ . . . " _I'm_ not. Are you? Let's do it the first way, Hawkeye."

Kate's grin was sharp, her eyes bright. "Glad you agree, Hawkeye." She downed the rest of her beer in one long gulp and grabbed two more from the mini-fridge, doing her level best to ignore the feeling of his eyes on her. She handed one to Clint and twisted the top off her own. "So, what kind of shots are we talking about?"

It was decided they'd use the range targets. They burned through target practice easily, both of them, without any losses. Even as the targets got smaller and further away, not to mention as they took advantage of the moving target option, neither of them missed a single shot.

"This is boring," Kate complained finally, while she waited for Clint to take a shot. She could feel sweat pooling at the base of her spine; the exertion alongside the heat didn't help. Clint grunted, then took the shot - perfectly, of course, his arrow embedding itself in the innermost ring of a moving target at thirty yards, the maximum distance the training room had to offer.

She pulled her bottle away from the side of her neck, where she'd been resting it. Her neck felt pleasantly cool. She didn't miss the way his eyes lingered on the patch of condensation.

"Well? I think we've exhausted the range."

Frowning, Kate agreed. "I guess we'll have to find something more interesting, huh?" Her eyes alighted on a shelf. "Hey, what are these?" She picked up two blue rubber balls and rolled them around in one palm curiously.

"Uh . . ." Clint rubbed the back of his neck. "Those are Natasha's stress balls?"

"Huh. She can bill me," Kate said confidently, and deposited one in his hand, setting the other down. "Hold it up!" He did as she asked, and she backed away to a respectable distance.

Aim. Exhale. Release.

She missed.

The arrow whizzed just over Clint's still hand, the shaft brushing the rubber ball and making it roll around a little. She wiped her sweaty fingers on her jeans. "My hand got slippery," she groused.

"It's a bad workman that always blames his tools . . ." Clint tossed the ball in the air, then caught it, grinning. "Especially if the tools are his own _hands._ "

"Oh, shut up." Kate toed off her sandals and kicked them aside, then went to retrieve the arrow from the wall. "What, you were hoping for something juicier?" she tossed over her shoulder at his look, and heard him laugh appreciatively.

He made the next shot - the one she had missed - but missed the one after that. The fletch quivered where the arrow had buried itself in the wall, while the rubber ball fell to the floor with a few bounces. Kate gave a slow clap. "That's right, Barton, take it off!"

"It was the _beer_." There was a little whine to his voice. He wasn't drunk after three beers, obviously, but had been pleasantly relaxed. Enough for him to think _yeah that's close enough_ when he would have known better totally sober, anyway.

Kate waved a finger in his face. "Nuh-uh, Barton. No excuses."

"And anyone could come in," he grumbled, but pulled his shirt off by the collar and tossed it aside, staring her down, challenging her to say something.

She only raised an eyebrow, though. "Getting to the good stuff already, huh?"

"Oh, good stuff? You enjoying the view there, Katie-Kate?" He spread his hands and tried to look un-self-conscious. He pretended not to notice the red flush spreading up from her neck, or the way she looked away but with reluctance.

Over the next thirty minutes, they each missed two more shots, bringing them both down to their underwear. Clint's boxers were threadbare, and there was probably a hole in the ass, which would have been more embarrassing if Kate's hadn't been plain utility white and a little on the grandma side. Maybe more than a little. Not that he was looking. Very closely, anyway.

"I think we've poked a hole in pretty much everything that can be poked," she said finally, inspecting the array of makeshift targets. "I hope I don't get a bill from Iron Man, of all people. But what could this stuff be worth?"

"Yeah, I'm sure there was priceless tech in those stress balls." He frowned. "Actually, I think there was. Not _priceless_ , I bet, but Nat said once . . ."

Kate winced and dropped one of them, basically shredded, into his palm. "Oops."

He gave her a half-hearted shrug and a grin, unrepentant. "You know what they say. Live and learn."

She was standing very close to him now - not touching, not quite, but he imagined he could feel the heat radiating from her skin. Removing their clothes hadn't really improved the whole overheating situation, he thought distantly. But he didn't move away, and neither did she.

Kate twisted her long hair into a knot, pulling it off her neck with one hand and flapping the other hand to make a breeze. Not very successfully, he guessed from her hiss of frustration. But it made the muscles in her back ripple under a sheen of sweat. She turned to look at him, to catch his gaze in that unnervingly blunt way she had, the one he both admired and looked away from on occasion.

"Hey," she said softly, barely more than a whisper. There was something in her expression - like she was gearing up to something, steeling herself. He watched as her resolve solidified. Then she let go of her hair and put out a hand to brace herself on his shoulder, leaning up on her toes to kiss him.

Her mouth against his was not quite as soft as he'd imagined. He found he liked it. It wasn't a long kiss, but it was long enough to slip an arm around her waist and pull her a little tighter against him, sweaty grossness be damned, catch her bottom lip between his, and hear her breath hitch, sudden and sharp. It sounded good. Really good.

Clint pulled back first, though, and rested his forehead against hers briefly. "Katie--"

She pinched his side in irritation, looking down. "Is this where you tell me this is a bad idea? You'll be bad for me, you're terrible at relationships, cycle of misery and pain, blah blah blah."

"Wow, that's pretty dark." He sighed through his nose. "Did I actually say any of that?"

She looked up him, a little hopeful and a little defiant. "What, you were going to say something else?" she challenged.

"It's not--" He sighed again. "Look, I don't think it's ridiculous that, given my history, maybe I want to--take it slow for once--"

"Take it slow?" And now she did pull back to look at him with a raised eyebrow. "I didn't know we were taking anything at any speed . . . ?"

Inexplicably, Clint was annoyed. "We went on a date last week!"

" _What?_ " She gaped at him. "Are you kidding? When have you and I ever gone on a _date?_ "

He floundered. "I asked you out--I picked you up--we went to dinner--"

"Yeah, like a million other times. It was the pizza place around the corner. No one dressed up. And you never used the word 'date'!"

"I paid!"

"You're totally rich, of course you did!" He refrained from pointing out _well so are you_. Kate's mouth opened and closed, looking for all the world like a fish, albeit a cute one. "That was your idea of a _date?_ " Her question was more incredulous than antagonistic, which Clint took as a good sign. "You didn't even try to _kiss_ me." She sounded, of all things, put out.

"Well," he said, shifting a little uncomfortably. "Y'know. Like I said. Taking it slow."

"You want to date me," Kate said slowly, putting it all together. "You don't think you-and-me is a terrible idea. You're cool with this."

"Well, I'm cool with trying," he hedged. His arm was still around her waist. "If you are, I mean."

She tried not to smile, unable to quite believe it. "That was not a date, though."

"It counts," he insisted.

"It does _not_ ," Kate said firmly. "Here, I'll take you on a real one to show you."

Clint felt a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah. We should probably put some clothes on first, though," she amended, looking around. "And maybe clean up."


End file.
